Journalling in Canvas

I wish to create a journal that individual students keep throughout the course, but which can be seen and ideally commented on by the teacher at intervals. At the moment an assignment seems the best option but can teachers view an assignment before it is submitted? Any suggestions? Thankyou.

I've seen teachers set up groups with just one student in them. Then assigned a discussion to each group. They have used these for ongoing journals, reading logs, portfolios of work during the year, goal setting and reflections etc. Working really well, especially with the younger students.

The one-student-to-a-discussion approach (whether done with Canvas Discussions, Google Doc, or Adobe Spark) keeps things simple in the Gradebook. The teacher just needs to remember to update the prompt and the due date. Sometimes I make a submission comment after each journal entry is graded, just so I remember how the accumulative score developed throughout the course.

Many thanks to all that replied to my question last month, and my apologies for not replying sooner. The course I was designing is now live and working well.

In this thread and the other there were several options:

BLOG - Students create a blog, share it into Canvas

COLLABORATIVE DOCUMENT - Google/Word document shared with tutor

DISCUSSION - Group discussion with students as groups of one

ASSIGNMENT - Periodic journal assignments.

I wanted the reflection process to be continuous, and function as a kind of co-reflection where the tutor was always able to access what was being written, and engage with the student, for this reason the assignment option wasn't quite right.

The students we have are not especially computer literate, (a couple could even be described as "luddites and proud!") and for this reason I felt the blog option might be asking too much. This consideration also applied to the idea of using a collaborative document (leaving aside some students resistance to using Google).

So I went for the group discussion option, which is working remarkably well, the students and tutors are having fluent conversations that could be described as a continuous asynchronous tutorial. However, a problem has arisen. Many of the students would like to be able to save their journals, but I have not find a way to download specific discussions.